Traveller's Bread.

Today I leave for England, and well overdue I am too, for a grown-up holiday – especially after the brief but traumatic disappearance of this entire blog (all 1566 posts of it) from the internet yesterday. I am still not sure exactly what happened, save that the domain name was temporarily re-assigned, but am most relieved that it is fixed. Blogger-willing, the next few days’ posts will come to you more or less on time thanks to its post-ahead facility.

The getting of food - good food, that is - while one is on the road or in the air is often frustrating, is it not? The idea got me thinking about what travellers did about this problem in the past. There are quite a lot of references to ‘traveller’s bread’ in the literature, and I wondered what this could mean.

Often of course, ‘bread’ in this context has its old meaning of any staple food, so we find it referring to something like pemmican, as in this extract from A Concise history of the introduction of Protestantism into Mississippi and the Soutwest, by the Rev. John Griffing Jones (1866)

“Their families and neighbors hastily collected and prepared such supplies as they would need on their long and perilous journey through the various tribes of Indians inhabiting the vast region between the Natchez country and Georgia. Travelers' bread was made by a union of corn meal and bear's oil, and other articles were added in the way of food such as they could carry.”

Often also, for obvious reasons, ‘traveller’s bread’ meant hardtack or sea-biscuit. Also for pretty obvious reasons, in the deserts of the Middle East, ‘bread’ might mean dates, as in a stanza from a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath in The Christian's monthly magazine and universal review (1846), it

VISION OF TRAVELLERS IN THE DESERT.

I lay awake—my saddle for a pillow neath my head,
And a wallet of dry dates, the desert-traveller's bread;
My caftan well spread out, o'er my feet and o'er my breast,
And near me, firelock, sword, and spear, to guard our nightly rest.

I did, thankfully, find an actual recipe for the topic of the day. It is from What to eat, and how to cook it: with rules for preserving, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, by John Cowan (1870) – the source of the wedding cake recipe from last week.

Travelers' Bread.

Take wheat meal and currants—or figs, dates, or raisins may be used by chopping them; stir quite stiffly with the coldest water—as briskly as possible so as to incorporate air with it; then knead in all the wheat meal you can. Cut in cakes or rolls one-half inch thick, and bake in a quick oven.

Quotation for the Day.

A trip is what you take when you can't take any more of what you've been taking.

Adeline Ainsworth.